It has been called “the invasion of the verbs,” and it seems to know no bounds. Nouns are being transmogrified into verbs at what seems an ever-increasing rate. Perhaps it has always been the case, but the pace seems to have taken a leap with the internet. It may be a reflection of the pace of our existence; we use nouns as verbs to save a word or two, and the tide is not to be contained.
A credit card company advises that charges will be statemented each month; we would ask why not “A statement of charges will be rendered monthly.” A fashion magazine speaks of accessorizing your wardrobe (“. . . adding accessories to your wardrobe . . .”). A district attorney states that they post-mortemed the corpse (“. . . performed a post-mortem . . .”), and an Army official declared that they funeralized their casualties (“. . . held funerals for the dead . . .”). A parent tells a teacher that he should role-model more effectively (“. . . be a more effective role-model . . .”). And, have you Xeroxed or FedExed a document lately?
Then there are our computer friends who are regularly interfacing, accessing, networking, and satelliting, all direct derivatives of perfectly good nouns that have long since lost their distinction. (We should, however, give credit to them for a great, fairly recent noun: cyberspace; though I suppose someone out there is cyberspacing!)
Words like finalizing, prioritizing, dialoguing, main-streaming, fast-tracking, and credentialing have been unceremoniously dumped on us for the most part by the worlds of business and government.
My examples are really not much more than a drop in the bucket to illustrate; new “verbs” abound. There are those who would respond to my laments with the usual, “Language evolves; get used to it.” To which I reply that with each of these short-cuts a certain elegance and precision is lost, and we are all the poorer for it. Seize the opportunity to resist; and the next time you are tempted to prioritize, simply “assign priorities”; to finalize, “make final”; and to accessorize, “add accessories.” You get the picture.
Enough with the verbizing!
— Ken Butera